Mid-Point Presentations have come and gone. It was good to try out articulating some of my findings to a group of my mentors and colleagues. I’ve had the luxury of following many different rabbit holes around the idea of culturally responsive curriculum. These ideas have been rolling around, unverbalized in my head, like rocks in a rock tumbler, waiting to be polished. We had a rock tumbler as a kid and I used to love putting all the rocks I found around Lake Michigan into this contraption. I was always so excited to see if the ugly rocks would turn into interesting-beautiful-shiny-baubles...sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t...

I am here in NZ seeking ideas to create culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy with a specific interest in looking at Māori educational practices.As a backdrop to my inquiry, the NZ Ministry of Education states:The success of New Zealand depends on Māori success and the success of Māori depends on their success as Māori...What a word, as. This word transforms the whole idea of education; this word calls for students to develop a strong cultural identity; this word powerfully makes a statement about student achievement; these two-letters call us to think about culture as a strength...

This takes me to thinking about the educational deficit model that we live in. We are not thinking about growing cultural identity, instead we talk about closing the achievement gap for groups of minorities; interventions are based on deficits; special education supports are based on deficits; restrictive environments are based on deficits...recently I came across the (not new) idea of shifting our thiniking away from deficits to “educational debt” (Gloria Ladson-Billings, 2006). Ladson-Billings equates the educational debt that we owe all non-white students to the national debt. We are spending too much of our educational and national budget on trying to repay, not the debt but the interest. Just as you can’t have a robust economy with a huge national debt, you can’t close the achieve the gap without addressing the educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Educational debt places the ownice on the education system (policies) in addressing deep-rooted social problems instead of on what students are unable to do and finding short-term solutions to these deficits. Ladson-Billings asks us to think about how historically, politically, economically, and morally education has been unequal for African Americans, Native Americans, Latina/o students. This debt needs to somehow be reconciled for the educational gap to reduce...

And then the stone that is their success as Māori comes back to the surface, tumbling up, looking more and more shiny...how can I apply this idea of students developing their cultural identity to my classroom? Can I create a strong classroom community rooted in the stories and traditions and cultures of the land? Would this begin to address the educational debt?

The slick rock that whispers, “we’re asked as teachers to have no culture but this equates with the colonizer’s culture; the culture of the privileged,” pokes its head up from the pile...this has added to the educational debt...and then I begin to think about the many studies that have been done about the role teacher biases play on student achievement. As a teacher this is a very difficult thing to admit or think about. Biases are human nature. Even if we think we are not showing our biases, students can read them in our body language and voice tone. That is a very difficult thing to come tumbling to the surface! I went into teaching with the best intentions (to empower students, to help them find their voice, to help them understand their power in our democracy) but somehow we, and I mean the we that is our society, are not paying off the educational debt. Instead, schools waste energy paying just a little bit of the interest it’s accruing...

My time here in New Zealand has passed the halfway point and I have more questions now then when I started. There are so many rabbit-holes that I want to pursue...I also have seen some amazing solutions and ideas that start to tackle these huge issues.

​I dream of schools, districts, states, and our federal government adopting the idea that the education success of the United States depends on the educational success of Native American, Latina/o, African American students and this success depends on their success as Native American, Latina/o, and African American.